Cognizanti Journal: XaaS, Code Halos, SMAC and the Future of Work

VOLUME 6 • ISSUE 1 2013

A bi-annual journal produced by Cognizant

XaaS, Code Halos, SMAC
and the Future of Work
The First Word
XaaS Marks the Spot

Everything as a Service
How BusinessCloud Solutions Can Help Enterprises
Run Better, Run Differently

Governance
BPaaS Requires Changing Mindsets Beyond Business Models

Future of Work
Code Rules: A Playbook for Managing at the Crossroads

Essay
The Changing Nature of Work: New Hours,
Venues, Values, Norms

The Last Word
Keep on SMACking: Taking Social, Mobile, Analytics and
Cloud to the Bottom Line

Cognizanti is a bi-annual journal published by Cognizant. Our mission is to
provide unique insights, emerging strategies and proven best practices that
globally-minded companies can use in their quest for business and IT
performance excellence.
All articles published in Cognizanti represent the ideas and perspectives of the
individual Cognizant associates and contributors who have documented
expertise in business-technology strategy and implementation. The content of
the articles published in Cognizanti represent the views of the individual
contributors and not necessarily those of Cognizant. They are put forward to
illuminate new ways of conceptualizing and delivering global services for
competitive gain. They are not intended to be, and are not a substitute for,
professional advice and should not be relied upon as such.
For more insights, and to continue the conversation online, please visit our
e-community at http://connections.cognizant.com.

© Copyright 2013, Cognizant Technology Solutions
No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission of Cognizant.

VOLUME 6 • ISSUE 1 2013

A bi-annual journal produced by Cognizant

The Cognizanti Team
Publisher:
Editor-in-Chief:
Editor:
Thought Leadership Program Manager:
Design/Print Production:

Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President, Strategy & Marketing
Alan Alper, Associate Vice President, Corporate Marketing
Reshma Trenchil, Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing
April Vadnais, Senior Manager, Corporate Marketing
Jason Feuilly, Associate Director, Corporate Brand/Design
Diana Fitter, Freelance Designer

Copy Editor:

Mary Brandel, Freelance Contributor

Columnist:

Bruce J. Rogow, Independent Advisor

Illustrator:

Steven DiNinno, Contributor

Digital Distribution:

Nikhilesh Jasuja, Director, Corporate Marketing

Editorial Advisory Board
Sukumar Rajagopal, Senior Vice President & CIO, Head of Innovation
Sanjiv Gossain, Senior Vice President, Head Nordics & UK/Ireland;
Global Head - Markets, Communications
Kaushik Bhaumik, Senior Vice President & Global Head,
Technology Industry & Partnerships
Srivatsan Nagaraja, Senior Vice President, Emerging Business Accelerator
Mark Livingston, Senior Vice President, Cognizant Business Consulting
Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications
Anand Chandramouli, Director, Cognizant Research Center

© Copyright 2013, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Table of Contents
1

Editor’s Note
Keep on Challenging: XaaS, Code Halos,
SMAC and the Future of Work

3

The First Word
Xaas Marks the Spot

8

How BusinessCloud Solutions Can Help Enterprises
Run Better, Run Differently

18

Governance
BPaaS Requires Changing Mindsets Beyond
Business Models

26

Future of Work
Code Rules: A Playbook for Managing
at the Crossroads

34

Essay
The Changing Nature of Work: New Hours,
Venues, Values, Norms

42

The Last Word
Keep on SMACking: Taking Social, Mobile, Analytics
and Cloud to the Bottom Line

●

Editor’s Note

Keep on Challenging:
XaaS, Code Halos, SMAC and the Future of Work
Grace Hopper, the late, great computer programming pioneer and U.S. Naval Officer, once said: “A
ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.”1 The same can be said of business.
Companies that circumvent the choppy, uncertain waters of the new global economy – and fail to
learn the new ways of working that are necessary for navigating it – will never get the opportunity
to glean the applicable customer insights and best practices needed to outmaneuver their rivals. But
given the steep economic challenges that confront most companies, embarking on such a journey is
clearly not for the faint of heart.
The Ivy League pedigrees, advanced degrees and ju-jitsu techniques learned while ascending the
organizational hierarchy will only take business and technology leaders so far. Venturing into
uncharted waters requires strength of conviction, perseverance and an innovative mindset, no matter
the odds or stakeholder objections. To successfully go where no business has gone before requires
corporate captains to test conventional operational assumptions, assess core model change
and trial advanced technologies and outcomes-based cost structures. Shipping out
beyond safe harbors can lead to the discovery of novel ways of working that both
help to contain costs and spark idling innovation engines.
This issue of Cognizanti journal is all about the courage needed to challenge the
status quo and successfully transition to the Future of Work. We revisit the
expanding world of “everything as a service” (see Cognizanti Volume 4, Issue 2),
a way of delivering business and IT services and processes that supplies the
business smarts, technological wherewithal and disruptive performance potential to
help organizations run better (containing costs) and run differently (embracing new
business capabilities that drive innovation). An accompanying piece looks into the soul of this
new machine and lays out the mandate for governance, change management and organizational
structural change.
We also examine the emerging world of Code Halos™ and the Crossroads Model,™ a place where
businesses of all shapes and sizes can unleash new forms of intelligence – and outperformance – by
decoding the collisions of digital information that surround every business transaction and personal
interaction. Further in, we probe the emerging reality of anytime/anyplace work – and discover the
professional and personal implications for us all. And finally, we conclude with sage counsel on how
IT and business groups can collaborate to harness the SMAC Stack™ (social, mobile, analytics and
cloud technologies), the transformative fuel that underpins Code Halos and catalyzes the Future of Work.
We hope both seafaring explorers and laggardly landlubbers will find these articles pragmatic
and inspiring. Let us know what you think: Feel free to share your latest challenges and solutions
at cognizantconnections@cognizant.com.

1

Henry S. Tropp, “Grace Hopper: The Youthful Teacher of Us All," Abacus Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Fall 1984)
ISSN 0724-6722.

https://connections.cognizant.com/

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●

The First Word

XaaS Marks the Spot
While the BusinessCloud evolves, software, infrastructure and platform services
are capturing the imagination and investment of companies across industries.
By Karthik Subramanian

Cloud computing is transforming the enterprise landscape, to the point that almost all business
functionality can now be provided “as a service.” Industry experts have promptly labeled this
phenomenon, “everything as a service” or, more simply, “XaaS” – a paradigm shift from the conventional
form of on-premises business service delivery. We have dubbed it BusinessCloud Solutions.™
Traditionally, on-premises business services required upfront investment in IT systems. These solutions
would then be updated and improved over their lifetimes, thereby giving rise to continuously greater
operational or maintenance expenditures. The XaaS model redefines the concept of third-party-delivered
cloud business and IT services. And as organizations absorb these changes, the cloud space continues to
evolve in terms of new software, platform and infrastructure services (see Figure 1).

The Evolution of Cloud Computing
The Internet is used for
business functions, such as e-mail,
file sharing, data transfer.

Tim Berners-Lee
develops HTML.

1994

1995

Amazon EC2 and S3
are launched. S3 uses a
“pay-per-use” pricing model,
which is still widely popular.
The dot.com
bubble bursts.

1996

August 1995
Netscape floats IPO
valued at $2 billion.

1999

2000

2002

2006

Amazon Web
Services is launched.
Salesforce.com is
founded in a San
Francisco apartment
by Marc Benioff, et al.

The Google app engine
is launched with a free
entry plan offering
low-cost computing
and storage services.

2008

Apple launches
iCloud, its cloud
computing and
storage service.

2009

Microsoft launches
the Azure beta,
signaling a major
shift to the Web.
Salesforce.com launches
Force.com, a PaaS system.

2011

2012

The CIA and U.S.
Department of
Homeland Security
reveal interest
in cloud computing.

2013

Thirteen IPOs and $10
billion in M&A activity
occur in the public
cloud space during
2012 and 2013.

Sources: Salesforce.com, SourceDigit, Cloud.Dzone, ComputerWeekly.com, LinkedIn, Computerworld.com
and Symantec.
FIGURE 1


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3

Percent of Organizations Adopting Cloud
SMB

73%

18%

9%

Enterprise

77%

17%

6%

Using cloud

Planning to use cloud

No plans

Source: “2013 State of the Cloud,” Rightscale, 2013.
FIGURE 2

The benefits of XaaS are emerging: reduced capital expenditures on hardware and software, swifter
response to marketplace changes, and greater and more timely innovation due to updates being the sole
province of a business process or IT specialist. XaaS is primed to take this to the next level by delivering
an agile infrastructure and a consumption-based “pay-as-you-go” commercial model that flexes with everchanging organizational and industry needs. Such agility is critical following last decade’s worldwide
economic meltdown and the need by many organizations to stay one step ahead of escalating globalization,
as well as the increasing virtualization of people, processes and platforms. Not surprisingly, an IDG survey
reveals that organizations expect to spend an average of $1.5 million on cloud-based services in the next
12 months, with large enterprises spending an average of $2.8 million. Overall, a majority of organizations
polled by Rightscale are either using or plan to use cloud in some shape or form (see Figure 2).1
Besides these emerging advantages, additional benefits will come in the form of automatic software
updates, embedded fallback and recovery services and increased employee, partner and customer
collaboration as enterprise resources are more effectively shared, thereby boosting productivity.
However, companies must be wary of the challenges presented by XaaS. In a May 2012 survey by Intel
Corp., 28% of respondents said they had experienced a public cloud-related security breach.2 Security
continues to top the list of concerns, as echoed in a 2013 report by North Bridge Venture Partners and
GigaOm Research, in which 46% of respondents cited security as an inhibitor to cloud adoption.3 Similarly,
a report released by CA Technologies found that 46% of respondents were concerned about cloud security
(see Figure 3, next page). Cloud services providers, however, are making significant progress in ensuring
data security (e.g., CipherCloud, whose open platform promises comprehensive security controls, such as
encryption, tokenization, cloud data loss prevention, cloud malware detection and activity monitoring).
Over time, we believe more and more of these security roadblocks will be surmounted.
XaaS concerns are often balanced by potential benefits achieved in the areas of cost, time to market and
operational agility. For example, new businesses capabilities can be rolled out within weeks rather than
months, and seasonally sensitive retailers can ratchet IT resources and business processing requirements
up and down as business requirements dictate. Even a small percentage increase in cost savings could
result in better competitive positioning. For all industries, the benefits of BusinessCloud computing are
overwhelmingly compelling, despite the risks associated with public cloud environments (see Figure 4,
next page).

The Bottom Line
Enterprises are embracing the BusinessCloud because they see its inherent value beyond cost savings.
They are keen to incorporate robust operating models and more efficient processes that generate
transformative advantages over the long term. XaaS growth appears fundamentally strong on a
foundational level, particularly in platform as a service and (Paas) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

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Security Concerns Prevail
46%

Security
34%

Privacy/legal issues
28%

Certain apps are too critical

26%

Cost
Performance/availability

19%

Cultural/political issues

19%
14%

Contracts/liability concerns

13%

Visibility into services across cloud

12%

Infrastructure readiness/network
0%

5%

10%

15%

20% 25% 30% 35%
(percent of respondents)

40%

45%

50%

Source: “TechInsights Report: Cloud Succeeds. Now What?” CA Technologies, 2013.
FIGURE 3

In an era when businesses are continuously looking to squeeze value from every dollar spent, cloudpowered XaaS has the power to be disruptive and innovative. The true value of BusinessCloud lies in its
ability to streamline the way enterprises leverage IT-powered business solutions, enabling them to focus
on their core competencies to gain a lasting competitive edge.

Why a Cloud Application Was Chosen Over Other Options
The cloud solution met our
compliance requirements

14%
58%
80%

The cloud alternative delivered better value

53%

The cloud solution offered greater
competitive advantage

13%

We choose cloud applications whenever
possible as part of our cloud strategy

14%

51%
42%

We had no requirement for cloud or
on-premise, but the cloud solution we
chose met our requirements better

12%
35%
13%

Other

2%
0%

20%

Business Executives

40%
60%
(percent of respondents)

80%

100%

CIOs

Source: “Drivers of Cloud Adoption,” Dimensional Research, December 2012,
http://www.cloudave.com/24550/drivers-for-cloud-adoption-cio-research/#.
FIGURE 4


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Footnotes
1

“2013 Cloud Computing,” IDG Enterprise, 2013,
http://www.computerworld.com/pdfs/editorial/2013IDGEnterpriseCloud.pdf.

2

“What’s Holding Back the Cloud?” Intel Corp., May 2012,
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/reports/whats-holding-back-thecloud-peer-research-report2.pdf.

3

“The Future of Cloud Computing,” North Bridge Ventures Partners and GigaOm, 2013,
http://www.northbridge.com/2013-cloud-computing-survey.

Karthik Subramanian is an Associate Research Manager in the Cognizant Research Center. He has more
than eight years of experience in various facets of research, such as sell-side equity research and strategic
research. He can be reached at Karthik.Subramanian4@cognizant.com.

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●


How BusinessCloud
Solutions Can Help
Enterprises Run Better,
Run Differently
Cloud-based business solutions — integrating people, processes and
technology — help leaders create new operating models, drive efficiency
and agility, and provide access to new capabilities and innovations to
deliver greater levels of performance.
By Mahesh Lunani

The cloud-powered “everything as a service” (XaaS) megatrend is exploding. McKinsey & Co. identifies
the “as a service” movement as one of the top IT-enabled business trends and a topic for the management
agenda.1 Until recently, its most visible and successful application has been in the realm of more technical
cloud computing services.
Now, XaaS is evolving from technology as a service to business as a service; new delivery models are
being adopted, from simple document management as a service to more complex business operations,
such as clinical data management as a service. Cloud is a key enabler of business as a service, creating
a new set of solutions we call Cognizant BusinessCloud™ Solutions. For enterprises both large and small,
BusinessCloud has the potential to deliver game-changing business model advantages that provide not
only must-have operational efficiencies but also real-time accessibility to the advanced capabilities and
innovations that are the lifeblood of outperformers (see Figure 1, next page).
Enterprises run better with BusinessCloud.™ By operating or consuming business as a service,
organizations can channel budget dollars that once went to capital investments or fixed costs to more
flexible, granular operating expenditures. Companies can quickly pivot their operations: Step up capacity
when needed and scale it back when it’s not, thus ratcheting down costs. In other words, BusinessCloud
helps drive budget efficiencies and cost agility.
Equally important, BusinessCloud enables enterprises to run differently. An efficiently run BusinessCloud
solution helps organizations rethink and redefine core activities, tap the virtualized workplace and reshape
how businesses operate inside their four walls and beyond with partners and customers. Such new
business models, layered with social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies (or the SMAC Stack™),
provide a unique value proposition. The result: New ways of conducting business and more extensive
capabilities that produce improved outcomes (see sidebars, pages 13, 14 and 16 for more detail).


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BusinessCloud Solutions' Dual Mandate

Run Different
Solutions that enable
enterprises to run new
business/operating models,
thus changing their
economic model.

Run Better

COGS

Solutions that enable
enterprises to run
efficiently and globally,
thus reducing costs.

(cost of goods sold)

SG&A
(selling, general
and administrative
expenses)

FIGURE 1

A well-designed BusinessCloud solution often enables businesses to transition to an as-a-service model
in weeks and sometimes days, depending on the extent of security, data integration and migration
challenges, as well as the complexity of the solution deployed.

Cloud computing has whetted enterprise
appetites for XaaS by continuously extending new
capabilities via a pay-per-use, service consumption
model that flexes with business needs and shifts
capital expenses to operating expenses.
XaaS: A New Operating Reality
The success of the XaaS model in IT services demonstrates organizations’ ability – and desire – to shift
to an as-a-service model. In a recent survey by IDG Research Services, over 60% of respondents said they
had implemented or piloted cloud computing.2 Cloud computing has whetted enterprise appetites for XaaS
by continuously extending new capabilities via a pay-per-use, service consumption model that flexes with
business needs and shifts capital expenses to operating expenses.
Likewise, packaging mainstream business functions as a service and operating them through the cloud
offers even greater impact. The BusinessCloud is set to become the Swiss Army knife of enterprise
services. Multifunctional, flexible and cost-effective, it is already redefining functions and reaching more

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areas within organizations. It also seamlessly integrates people, processes, technology and, in some
cases, physical assets.
Take the example of 3-D printing as a service. Rather than maintaining expensive printers, consumers or
manufacturers can leverage cloud-based business services from 3D Systems Corp. for their 3-D printing
needs.3 Enterprises can upload 3-D digital files and specify material type, and the company's on-demand
service then processes and ships 3-D assets to its customers. This application has the potential to change
business dynamics across aerospace, medical device and automotive enterprises, allowing them to run better
and run differently, across their prototype, production and service parts operations.4

BusinessCloud: Rethinking the Enterprise
BusinessCloud empowers business leaders to deconstruct their enterprises and rebuild them in ways that
offer new strategic advantages and, ultimately, better economic models that radically alter the rules of
the game.
An example of how BusinessCloud empowers business leaders is in the area of medical management.
Medical management is a core business operation that health plans execute to administer the
appropriateness of medical services, engage risky populations in preventive care programs and address
chronic diseases. The cost of administering medical management is roughly $2.00 to $3.00 per month per
member across the insured U.S. population. These costs increase significantly for severely ill, Medicare
and Medicaid populations. The total administrative cost of medical management represents multiple
billions spent annually by payers, considering there are roughly 250 million insured individuals in the U.S.
With medical management as a service, health plans leverage a fully integrated solution combining
medical management software and the talents of a virtualized clinical global workforce. By delivering
more efficient and on-demand use of expensive clinical resources – as well as automation algorithms,
analytics and economies of scale with cloud software and infrastructure – medical management as a
service enables health plans to reduce administration costs by upwards of 45% and minimize capital
expenditures and fixed costs.

Reducing Health Plan Costs, Driving Innovation with
Cognizant's Medical Management as a Service
“Run Different,” impacting 85% of health plan
costs and medical expenses

“Run Better,” impacting 15% of health
plan and admin costs

85%

Provider-led utilization
management

Technology, analytics
automation

Bundled episode
medical payments
Differential care
management

Nurses

Patient-centric
integrated care
Customer self-service

Innovative

CareSERV Care CoE

15%

Global clinical
workforce/best practices
IT hosting, maintenance

Software

FIGURE 2


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11

As-a-service approaches to medical management enable health plans to also run differently, as riskbearing providers rather than health plans are engaged in decision-making on medical services and
patient treatments. As such, hospitals or physician groups are compensated with a fixed fee per episode,
not on the traditional fee-for-service model. This approach drives greater patient engagement. By rearchitecting medical management operations, health plans free up significant capital to invest in
patient-centric care management and enable organizations to focus on increasing their member
population while reducing medical costs. Our CareSERV™ BusinessCloud solution helps health plans build
stronger businesses by delivering medical management as a service (see Figure 2, previous page).5
Cloud-delivered business solutions fit consistently and nicely into Clayton Christensen's framework for
“disruptive innovation,”6 according to Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net, a provider of a clouddelivered document and file-sharing service. Since its 2005 inception, the company has attracted 15
million users, small businesses and Fortune 500 companies to its as-a-service model for document and
file sharing. As such, it has reshaped how enterprises share content and create a ubiquitous work
environment for knowledge workers.

Benefits of BusinessCloud Solutions
Our work in XaaS includes cloud-based business utilities that span a wide spectrum of industry and
horizontal solutions. One such example is our SmartTrials™ BusinessCloud solution,7 which lets
pharmaceutical companies manage clinical trials with an on-demand platform, centralized and remote
monitors, and a risk-based monitoring process.
Based on our experience, organizations can expect to gain the following benefits when they implement
BusinessCloud solutions (see Figure 3):
1. New business value. With BusinessCloud solutions, enterprises gain new capabilities
and operating models that create new sources of value. A major mobile reseller, for
example, supplements its brick-and-mortar operations with our Order Management as a
Service (OMaaS™) BusinessCloud solution. It enables the reseller to not only run better –
through automated order management, activation and fulfillment – but also to run
differently by offering a unified, multichannel customer experience across the Web and its
retail stores. (See sidebar, “Wireless Retailer Creates a Unified Customer Experience.”)

Enterprise Benefits of BusinessCloud Solutions
New Business Value
Access to new capabilities,
new operating models
and new sources of
customer value.

Disruptive Performance
Multiplier effect of global
workforce and virtualized
process layered with
SMAC technologies.

BusinessCloud
Multifunctional,
ﬂexible and ®
cost-effective
Ubiquitous and Knowledge
Work Efficiencies
On-demand, standardized
work while driving
collaboration and creativity.

Budget Efficiencies
and Cost Agility
Asset-light model, allowing
for business pivots, scale
and business growth.

FIGURE 3

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Quick Take
Wireless Retailer Creates a Unified Customer Experience
By Todd Weinert
Few marketplaces are as hot as mobile. To distinguish itself and gain a fresh edge on its
competition, a U.S. wireless retailer worked with us to create a customer experience as
modern and flexible as its products.
The company is a retailer of all things mobile: cellular devices, smartphones, tablets and
mobile broadband devices that operate on the Verizon Wireless network. It is a retailer,
however, and not a carrier, meaning that its customers can also choose to do business
with Verizon. To earn repeat business, the distributor needs to offer a simple and
seamless experience. Purchasing channels have clearly expanded, and consumers now
move quickly among them. Online, mobile, store – customers choose how and when to
make contact.
To stay successful, the retailer needed a consistent customer experience
and marketing message. It chose our BusinessCloud solution called
OMaaS to create an integrated, cross-channel shopping experience,
as well as deliver a flexible, end-to-end order management
platform.
OMaaS manages the distributor’s customer experience across
multiple channels and provides a more holistic approach for store
associates, as well. For example, when customers who used the
company’s online channel then visit one of its several hundred stores,
associates can access their transactions and offer promotions and service
bundles tailored to individual buyers’ past purchases.
In addition to driving more foot traffic to stores, the new system enables associates to
direct customers to online promotions, allowing the company to capture incremental
sales opportunities from store to Web and back again, from Web to store.
The OMaaS subscription service lets the company quickly launch new products and
services, minimizing upfront capital outlays. It also links operational expenses to order
volume. And in addition to shopping and ordering, it integrates fulfillment, social media
and customer care. The real-time analytics and reporting capabilities allow the company
to make more informed decisions.
OMaaS puts the company at the forefront of a shared e-commerce and point-of-service
experience that its competitors can’t match.

Todd Weinert is Cognizant’s AVP and OMaaS Venture Leader. He can be reached at
Todd.Weinert@cognizant.com.


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Quick Take
Life Sciences Spin-off Revs Up its Global Marketing Game
with Digital Asset Management
By Jitin Agarwal
Like all new companies, a client that recently spun off from an established healthcare giant
wanted to distinguish itself in the eyes of key influencers – prescribing doctors. Its goal: To
more easily create and share sophisticated digital collateral that highlights the remedial
qualities of its products.
Sophisticated, interactive and detailed presentations for the iPad, however, are expensive
to produce and manage. The company's global marketing teams worked largely
independently of each other, with few opportunities to share and reuse creative assets such
as brochures, videos and images.
Moreover, costs ran high, even for a well-capitalized company. For instance, each interactive,
detailed presentation costs tens of thousands of dollars to produce. The repeat work among
multiple brands and global locations slowed time to market and hindered sales momentum.
For this client, creating a ubiquitous process of gathering its digital assets onto
a cloud-based platform was a natural choice. The company embraced our
assetSERV™ BusinessCloud digital asset management solution for its
operational flexibility, economies of scale and secure data
transmission. As such, assetSERV is now a critical cog in the
company's digital marketing makeover.
Traditional digital asset management systems can take several
months to implement, but in seven weeks, this client rolled out
assetSERV for five brands in 22 European countries. (See
“Revitalizing Marketing’s Digital Content Chain,” Cognizanti Journal,
Volume 4, Issue 2.) It plans to eventually expand the use of assetSERV
globally. The cloud-delivered service standardizes the management and
storage of images, videos and all collateral components. The improved and newly
efficient processes allow the pharma company's creative teams to repurpose brand content
quickly and localize it for regional markets. Internal teams and external partners store
presentation components as reusable content in a centrally accessible library.
With its end-to-end digital content solution, which includes the assetSERV platform and
creative services to produce and reuse content, the client and its agencies seamlessly
exchange content and use a staging area for pre-production content. Today, the company can
host and repurpose content like never before, and its iPad presentations are sophisticated
and unified.
Jitin Agarwal is Cognizant's assetSERV Venture Leader. He has nearly 20 years of
experience building 30-plus products across multiple startups and ventures in his career.
Previously, as a serial entrepreneur, Jitin led TechRepublic.com, NetMinds Consulting and
Gartner’s membership program. He is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and
Northwestern University and can be reached at Jitin.Agarwal@cognizant.com.

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2. Disruptive performance is made possible when organizations marry a virtualized
workplace and new operating models with SMAC technologies. This multiplier effect
enables BusinessCloud solutions to deliver improved business outcomes, such as cost per
customer, number of orders, revenue per customer and time to market – all of which are
measurements that can yield deeper and more granular insight into true business
performance. (See sidebar, “From 12 Weeks to 39 Minutes: An Insurer Speeds IT Updates
– and Strengthens its Business.”)
3. Budget efﬁciencies and cost agility. BusinessCloud solutions allow enterprises to
eliminate large chunks of upfront capital investments and operationalize their expenses.
The change provides an economic model that is scalable and lowers the break-even point.
This model is one of the drivers of success for cloud computing services. Similar budget
efficiencies and cost agility will be offered to business functions using cloud-based
business solutions, to create more nimble and improved return on investment.
4. Ubiquitous enterprise work and knowledge worker efﬁciencies. BusinessCloud
allows work that is ubiquitous and standardized across the enterprise, while configured to
differentiate an enterprise or knowledge worker. Our assetSERV solution provides a cloudbased global platform that enables marketing organizations and creative agencies to
produce, manage, store and retrieve their marketing digital assets, whenever and wherever
needed. (See sidebar, “Life Sciences Spin-off Revs Up its Global Marketing with Digital
Asset Management.”)

Executing on the BusinessCloud Promise
From a design point of view, enterprises need to develop their strategies for XaaS and BusinessCloud at
corporate or functional levels. Whether they want to consume cloud-based business solutions or offer
them to their end customers, they need to determine how these solutions will help them create more
competitive economic models. And when it comes to execution, they need to select the right partner,
assess the opportunities and risks, and launch pilots that instill confidence and drive success.
The following enterprise conditions typically lend themselves to successful use of BusinessCloud solutions:
●

The need for ubiquitous and standardized work across the enterprise.

●

A virtualized workplace with highly skilled and scarce knowledge workers.

●

The need for a flexible cost structure and limited CapEx spending.

●

The need for innovation and new operating models to be implemented rapidly and allow for
business pivots.

●

A high cost to transition from the current to the next-generation technology platform.

●

A desire to pay per outcome rather than pay per service.

Companies are changing because the world is changing around them. According to an analysis of Forbes
magazine’s annual ranking of the world's largest companies, there has been a significant shift in the global
landscape of large companies. The Americas had 189 fewer companies on the list in 2012 than in 2004.
In today’s business world, there are no more sacred cows. Organizations need to radically rethink their
underlying operating models to run better and run differently and respond to market changes.
BusinessCloud Solutions delivered via an as-a-service model is an enabler for enterprises looking to alter
the rules of the game.


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15

Quick Take
From 12 Weeks to 39 Minutes: An Insurer Speeds IT
Updates — and Strengthens its Business
By Ramesh Panuganty
Financial services companies routinely maintain hundreds of core applications and systems for
everything from billing and claims to fraud detection. Upgrades can easily become
overwhelming.
When a leading investment and insurance company found its application updates required a
lengthy 12 weeks, slowing its ability to roll out new products, it looked to a software as a
service solution. The insurer leveraged our Cloud360™ BusinessCloud solution to quickly shift
its development and test environments to a public cloud. The shift automated the company’s
project synchronization and brought new life to its development efforts. The time now required
to update cloud-based applications? Thirty-nine minutes.
The new environment, launched in the first quarter of 2013, is the insurer’s
first foray into cloud-based technology. In addition to the speedy system
updates, the insurer also gained consistency across all of its
environments and greater insight into its operations, with the ability
to track each business unit’s resource consumption.
After a week of planning and identifying the requirements, the team
completed implementation in four weeks. Validation took four more
weeks. Our team created a hybrid architecture that integrated the
existing system’s components and migrated development, user
acceptance testing, regression and performance testing to Amazon Web
Services.
Our Cloud360 solution monitors consumption across the environments and recommends
optimized usage. By reducing the provisioning timelines from months to minutes and
implementing usage metrics, the investment and insurance company gained a more adaptive
and elastic business environment. It also enabled scalability, reduced costs and increased
operational efficiencies, such as speeding batch application performance by 40%.
Today, the company builds more applications faster, and without the delays of unwieldy
logistics and overly complex project management.
Ramesh Panuganty is Cognizant’s Cloud360 Venture Leader. He can be reached at
Ramesh.Panuganty@cognizant.com.

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Footnotes
1

Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui and James Manyika, “Ten IT-Enabled Business Trends for the Decade
Ahead,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2013.

2

“Enterprises See Key Benefits in Deploying Cloud Services with Virtualized Network Resources,”
IDG Research, March 2012.

3

3D Systems Web site, http://www.3dsystems.com/.

4

Joseph Flaherty, “Support Material: How One Company Built the 3-D Printer Market Layer by Layer,”
Wired, May 14, 2013.

5

“A New Payer Model for Medical Management,” Cognizant Technology Solutions, March 2013,
http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/A-New-Payer-Model-for-Medical-ManagementExecution.pdf.

6

Aaron Levie, “Is the Cloud the Ultimate Disruptive Innovation?” Fortune, September 27, 2011,
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/27/is-the-cloud-the-ultimate-disruptive-innovation/.

7

Rachelle Fong and Rita Purvis, “Risk-based Monitoring Strategies for Improved Clinical Trials
Performance,” Cognizant Technology Solutions, June 2013.

8

“ISG Research: Landscape of Large Companies Changing,” Information Services Group press release,
May 9, 2013, http://kpho.membercenter.worldnow.com/story/22205024/isg-research-landscape-oflarge-companies-changing.

Mahesh Lunani is a Venture Partner and a Senior Leader of Cognizant’s Emerging Business Group. He has
19 years of experience building businesses, from startups through established entities, and has worked
with over 100 enterprises globally on a range of business issues across vertical markets. Previously, he
was a partner at IBM and Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. He received an M.S. in manufacturing
engineering from Wayne State University and a GMP from Harvard Business School. Mahesh can be
reached at Mahesh.Lunani@cognizant.com.


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●

Governance

BPaaS Requires
Changing Mindsets
Beyond Business
Models
Delivery models based on business process as a service demand that
providers, buyers and vendors not only collaborate but also work as one.
By Anbu Muppidathi

The accelerating growth of virtualization and cloud computing has meant that application environments
are increasingly moving into the cloud. This, in turn, has caused organizations to increasingly migrate their
traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) to the business process as a service (BPaaS) model.
The transition from BPO to BPaaS involves three significant and simultaneous transformations.
●

●

●

Buyer transformation: The wider deployment of cloud services in the enterprise tends to
cause a tectonic shift in the buyer’s business model. Although the size and culture of the
organization generally determines the pace of transformation, organizations are almost
always under pressure from their customers and shareholders to invest in BPaaS as the
next step. Additionally, increasing cost pressures drive buyers to monetize their
nondifferentiating assets or establish joint investments with others. As assets are
monetized, the only meaningful alternative is to buy services through utilities. In such a
situation, BPaaS becomes the natural choice.
Service provider transformation: BPaaS is disrupting providers’ service models by
cannibalizing their traditional revenue stream and forcing them to invest in BPaaS to stay
relevant in the era of social, mobile, analytics and the cloud, or the SMAC Stack.TM
As service providers develop utilities (i.e., business processes to host over the cloud), they
need to either partner with vendors (product/hardware companies) or build their own
platforms. This requires them to embrace a product-service mindset.
Vendor transformation: Over the past decade, software development lifecycle (SDLC)
tools for development through deployment have been radically transformed. Similarly,
collaboration, customer engagement and fee models have also evolved to adjust to
emerging technology megatrends. Vendors are forced to invest in service models that are
easy and effective to administer, leading them to develop BPaaS models, or partner with
BPaaS service providers, to bring their products to the cloud. As a result, vendors are
embracing a services mindset.


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The result of these simultaneous transformations means buyers, service providers and vendors must work
as one to achieve business results that deliver on BPaaS’s improved economies of scale and cost
efficiency for one and all constituents.
By design, BPaaS shifts the cost burden of asset ownership to the provider, leaving the buyer’s
organization to focus on the quality (i.e., outcomes) of cloud-based business process service delivery. As
buyers focus more on outcomes, their feedback helps providers fine-tune their products (business process
and infrastructure). Such collaboration is required not only for business effectiveness but also for business
agility and regulatory reasons. However, it also leads to managerial, operational and regulatory
complexities for buyers, providers and vendors. For example, buyers and providers may need to react to
changes in industry regulations. As the providers own the business process, it becomes their
responsibility to address the change. Such a need will inevitably cause a product-services mindset to
evolve among the three parties (see Figure 1).

Achieving the product-services mindset involves
transitioning from the buy/sell mentality to a
state of universal collaboration.
Achieving the product-services mindset involves transitioning from the buy/sell mentality to a state of
universal collaboration, and the convergence among buyers, service providers and vendors makes this mindset
change almost inevitable. Some best practices that must be considered while adopting BPaaS include:
●
●
●
●

Metrics must shift from service levels to business outcomes (change in governance).
The buyer must provide guidance in the BPaaS deployment cycle (change in production
environment).
Collaboration must move from “inside” to “outside” the organization (change in
collaboration).
The role of CIOs and other key managers must be redefined as the organization adapts to
a BPaaS model (change in the role of IT).

Convergence Leads to Mindset and Model Changes
Changing Business Models

Getting the
tt
services mi
vic mindset

Buyers

Product /
Hardware
Vendors

Monetizing
i
nondifferentiating
erentia
assets
set

Service
Providers

Decidin whether to build
e ng
e
your o or partner
own or art

Changing Mindset

FIGURE 1

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Changes Required for BPaaS Adoption Maturity
Change in
Production
Provide guidance
in the BPaaS
deployment cycle.

Change in Governance
Switch focus from
service levels to
business outcomes.

Convergence
leads to
maturity of
BPaaS adoption

Change in
Collaboration
Move collaboration
from “inside” to
“outside.”

Change in IT
Redeﬁne the role of
CIOs and key IT
managers for
BPaaS adoption.

FIGURE 2

These best practices are especially relevant now, as BPaaS adoption moves into the mainstream, and the
teams on the ground are forced to change. It is important to acknowledge the transformation that buyers
and sellers must undergo, since any resistance to these changes will impact the maturity of the BPaaS
adoption. On the other hand, taking the necessary steps to voluntarily bring about these changes will lay
a strong foundation for successful BPaaS deployment (see Figure 2).

Shifting from Service Levels to Business Outcomes
BPaaS shifts the focus from suppliers’ operational service levels to the buyer’s business outcomes. This
change in focus requires collaboration between the provider and buyer to enable them to define, align and
govern the measures around it. The only way “value” can be defined is by translating the provider’s
operational service levels to the organization’s business performance. For example, when it comes to a
trade management system at a financial services company, reducing the “cost-per-trade” is far more
relevant than reducing the supplier’s “turnaround time.” Similarly, in a customer management system,
“customer onboarding time” is considered more important than “query response time.” The takeaway: The
buyer’s governance team must assume the responsibility of administering business measures in the BPaaS
model that is deployed. However, it is equally important to periodically review and align metrics that
measure outcomes because the business and IT teams have widely differing views on the value that
service providers deliver.
BPaaS models automatically establish business outcomes as the expected service level. Customers do not
manage the software or service components. Hence, it may not make sense to establish operational
parameters as service levels. By establishing proper business measures, the risk of “value leakage”
becomes the supplier’s responsibility. Once business outcome is established as the expected service level,
it becomes easier to track the cost aspects of the BPaaS model being deployed. The organization is able
to effectively establish the cost structure, a reward/penalty structure and year-over-year expected
productivity improvements. As the focus changes from external to internal performance parameters,
organizations must compare BPaaS effectiveness with others in the marketplace. Hence, industrystandard benchmarks are critical.


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The good news: Requiring the provider community (service provider and hardware/product vendors) to aim
at expected business outcomes will facilitate increased collaboration between them. This will simplify the
tracking mechanism and increase the chances of achieving the business outcome consistently.

Providing Guidance in the BPaaS Deployment Cycle
As BPaaS solutions shift product development responsibilities to the provider or vendor, the customer is
freed to focus on business outcomes that are differentiating and drive competitive advantage. However,
forces such as increasing regulations ensure that it is in the interest of the buyer and provider to ensure
that the BPaaS deployment processes are mutually controlled. Buyers should carefully manage their
participation in the providers’ “solutioning” activities; otherwise, the core benefit of the utility model that
BPaaS enables will be undermined. The organization’s role should only be in an advisory capacity and
should not require actual development. This can be achieved by setting up an advisory council with
representatives possibly from the buyer, providers and vendors.

In a typical BPaaS deployment cycle, the
advisory council should be heavily involved in
solutioning activities to ensure the services
provided under BPaaS consistently meet the
fundamental expectations of the buyer.
In a typical BPaaS deployment cycle, the advisory council should be heavily involved in solutioning
activities to ensure the services provided under BPaaS consistently meet the fundamental expectations of
the buyer (see Figure 3). Such a mechanism will also help define any external (regulatory) control
parameters in addition to the business outcome. The buyer’s involvement in the BPaaS deployment
processes also helps improve the providers’ development lifecycle activities so that the quality of the
productized service continually improves and achieves pre-set business outcome metrics. In this way,
BPaaS becomes a win-win for both the buyer and provider.

Advisory Council Involvement in BPaaS
Product Advisory Council
Provider, Buyer, Vendor(s)

Positioning and
Directional Inputs
BPaaS Deployment Lifecycle

Solutioning
Business
solution
Technology
solution
Product features
and business
requirements
Operations design

FIGURE 3

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Collaboration: Moving from ‘Inside’ to ‘Outside’
Traditional businesses focus on building forums for collaboration within the organization. When it comes
to BPaaS, the focus of collaboration should move from “inside” to “outside” the organization, bringing
together buyers, their customers, vendors and providers.
Providers should be responsible for building and administering collaboration forums. Distilling the
knowledge achieved through collaboration and using it in the BPaaS deployment lifecycle activities should
be the provider’s responsibility. The advisory council should ensure that the necessary steps are taken to
achieve the defined level of collaboration. The role and involvement of the advisory council will vary,
depending on the business process/utility development methodology adopted by the provider.
It is important to establish guidelines and processes between buyer and provider at the outset of the
contractual arrangement. As the provider’s collaboration focus shifts from inside to outside, its BPaaS
components also mature and should yield much better value to the buyer (see Figure 4).

Role of IT in a BPaaS Environment
CIOs on the buyer’s side are responsible for administering the infrastructure and information of their own
business content. As in any “buy” situation, CIOs should ensure that service providers properly administer
interfacing systems/applications/data. CIOs must also ensure that the provider establishes and
administers infrastructure for the universal collaboration discussed earlier. With the BPaaS provider
assuming responsibility for business support functions, the role of the CIO changes substantially, as
explained in the next section.

Production vs. Consumption
BPaaS adoption will generate knowledge within the buyer’s environment, and it is in the interest of both
the buyer and provider to manage this knowledge appropriately. It is important to devise ways to translate
the end-user experience into codified knowledge on which the provider can act, as it will ensure that the
adopted BPaaS solution continuously improves and is increasingly effective within the buyer’s

Moving Collaboration from ‘Inside’ to ‘Outside’
What are the best practices?

Customer

How to improve service levels?

Shared
Values
Peers

Provider

Engagement
Values

What do customers want?

Product Advisory
Council
Provider

Self-Organizing
Networks

Market
Values
Peers

BPaaS
Provider
Product /
Hardware
Vendors

How to make the
business stronger?
Customer

Business
Values
How to maximize business outcomes?

Provider &
Customer

Customer’s
Customers

FIGURE 4


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environment. Buyers must share knowledge appropriately in order to improve their own and their service
providers’ operating model. CIOs should take on the responsibility of not only managing the “production”
of knowledge/information but also improving business outcome quality. Improving and carefully
administering the production, sharing and consumption of knowledge will make the established BPaaS
business model agile and yield greater economic results for both the buyer and provider.

Talent Management
As BPaaS solutions shift product development to the provider’s vendor of choice, managers on the buyer
side must participate in the providers’ solutioning activities. Again, a hybrid product-services mindset will
be helpful in ensuring that the BPaaS delivery model achieves the desired set of business outcomes. It is
imperative, therefore, that these managers receive appropriate training to ensure the effectiveness of
their participation in providers’ BPaaS deployment lifecycle activities. They must be taught to focus not on
operational SLAs but on the business outcomes and learn to play an advisory role rather than monitor the
delivery process.

A hybrid product-services mindset will be
helpful in ensuring that the BPaaS delivery model
achieves the desired set of business outcomes.
Additionally, collaboration models must extend beyond core BPaaS stakeholders into the bowels of the
organization (line of business leaders and process owners). This, again, means a mindset change among
buyer managers to facilitate collaboration that runs deep and wide and delivers benefits to all
participants. Managers lacking these skills and tendencies will find them difficult to improvise and will
fail to deliver the envisioned benefits of BPaaS. Hence, these managers must be trained on how to
effectively function in a global network of collaborative virtual teams.
As the role of the CIO and key managers changes during the run-up to BPaaS delivery, so must the
embrace of a product-services mindset within the buyer’s IT environment. This helps build stronger
relationships not only with providers but also with their vendor business partners.

Moving Forward
Adoption of BPaaS is not just about buying services over the cloud; it is a mindset change and model
change. It forces the organizations of buyers, providers and vendors to change their approach to
governance, production and collaboration, as well as the role of CIOs. BPaaS introduces an entirely new
mindset among providers, buyers and product/hardware vendors, requiring tighter alignment for all to
prosper and for each member of the triumvirate – buyer’s organization, service provider and vendors – to
achieve business success.
The transformation of the buyer’s organization business model happens automatically as advanced
algorithms, access to global talent with precise domain specialization and consumption-based, “pay as
you go” commercial models generate pre-set performance targets, making their businesses stronger.
Mindset change is the challenge. Unless the buyer, provider and the vendors properly prepare, it will be
difficult to create a sustainable model to co-create value for each other.

Anbu Muppidathi is a Vice President within Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services Business Unit.
With 23 years of industry experience, Anbu manages the company’s relationships with key global banking
and financial services (BFS) clients in North America, Europe and Canada and is among the principal
architects for the unit’s growth strategy, delivery and operations initiatives and pioneering methodologies
and implementation plans. He can be reached at Anbu@Cognizant.com.

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●

Future of Work

Code Rules:
A Playbook for
Managing at the
Crossroads
By making meaning from the digital information that surrounds people,
organizations and devices, businesses can create unprecedented levels of value.
By Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring

Think fast: What separates today’s high-flying outliers – such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and
Pandora – from fast-followers and wannabes? It’s the ability to disrupt markets by capturing customer
insight and market meaning from the flood of data swirling around us all. In fact, the data that accompanies
people, organizations and devices contains a richness of potential business meaning that far outstrips the
value of bricks, mortar and other physical assets that have historically powered market leadership.
Now, think about your personal mobile and computing gadgets, and all the things you do with them:
connect with friends, play games, manage your money, read books, work, watch movies, listen to music,
monitor your fitness, get directions, buy any number of products and so on. Consider also all the digital
information flowing daily between every “computing” device – tablets, mobile phones, gaming consoles
and “things” (cars, televisions, airplanes, even toothbrushes). Each is surrounded by a blanket of invisible
energy. But it’s not electricity; it’s a halo of digital information connecting people, organizations, processes
and devices.
These valuable digital records – which we call “Code Halos™” – comprise all of our digital activity, from
buying behaviors, social media interactions and song preferences, through searches and even our
geographic location. Every click, swipe, “like,” buy, comment, deposit, jog and search produces
information that creates a unique virtual identity. Code Halos are important to us as individuals – most of
us generate and share digital information every day (see Figure 1, next page, for an illustrative view).
But Code Halos are also vital to future business success. Historically, if organizations made the best
product for the money or provided the best customer service, their company would succeed. But that’s no
longer the case. It’s still essential to have great products and people, but future-ready businesses
understand that it’s the digital information – the Code Halos – that customers, products, partners and
employees build and share that can create unprecedented levels of insight and business value, when
handled with respect to privacy and security.


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Our Personal Code Halos

FIGURE 1

Code Halos: Market Implications
Amazon beating Borders ... Netflix knocking off Blockbuster ... Apple acing Kodak – these are not isolated
or random events. Instead, they are canaries in the coal mine. Traditional companies, as well as those
“born digital,” are now harnessing the power of Code Halos. GE is creating “Brilliant Machines” ... Disney
is launching the “Magic Band” at its theme parks ... Allstate uses a mobile telematics device and analytics
to transform auto insurance ... Nike has gained tremendous traction with its “Fuel Band.” When
companies base their business models on the insights and meaning derived from intersecting (or colliding)
Code Halos, they cause market reverberations that can quickly topple even the most stalwart of industry
incumbents.
By decoding the digital information contained in Code Halos, leaders in industries ripe for disruption –
banking, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare and others – can embrace a new business-technology
model and avoid business catastrophes as already experienced by Borders Books, Blockbuster, HMV,
Circuit City, Kodak and others.
In studying these dynamics – which have been repeated in multiple industries, including books, movie
rentals, mobile phones, insurance, consumer goods, newspapers and travel services – we recognize that
vast industry transformations and the resulting violent value migrations have followed a similar pattern.
This pattern is what we call the Crossroads Model™ (see Figure 2), which explains how Code Halos are
forever changing business.

Managing at the Crossroads
The Crossroads Model consists of five key stages:
1. Ionization: The combination of changing economic pressures, enhanced customer
expectations and new technologies creates a fertile context and environment for the
establishment of Code Halos and related new business models.

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The Crossroads Model: Winning with Code Halos

Market Capitalization

Ionization

Spark

Enrichment

Crossroads

After the Crossroads
Company B
Winning the
New Code Rush

Company A
Focused
on Assets

Company B
Focused on
Code Halos

Company A
The Extinction Event

Time
Something’s changed
and you can feel it.
Organizations
need to gather data
and intelligence.

Look at places where
data collisions occur,
where halos collide,
opportunities exist
to reengineer your
business around the
customer experience.

With these collisions,
you can get smart,
and begin to exploit
the opportunities
of halo collisions.
This is where you set
the course for the
business — win or lose.

The turning point
where smart companies
accelerate growth
and poor companies
head towards an
extinction event.

FIGURE 2

2. The Spark: Once Code Halos build, associated algorithms are also developed. New ideas
and offerings are then formed, based on the intersection of Code Halos. An innovative
“Spark” then quickly reshapes processes inside the enterprise, as well as at the customer
interface. Think Pandora in music or Progressive in insurance.
3. Enrichment: This is the period where Code Halos – if created and managed correctly –
grow by orders of magnitude, both in number of users and value of data, giving rise to new
products, processes and models for value creation.
4. The Crossroads: This is a compressed period of time – often between one and three years
– where industry leadership shifts, quickly. At the Crossroads, Code Halos have reached
critical mass and are creating new customer expectations and economic models. This drives
a rapid, sometimes violent, swing in reputation, revenue and market value.
5. The New Code Rush (or Extinction Event): After the Crossroads, companies face two
widely divergent paths, with significant momentum (either positive or negative) that is
extremely difficult to reverse. Either they recognize and respond to the signposts of the
preceding phases and ascend rapidly, gaining in market relevance and value, or – if they are
not prepared for the rapid market shift – they head painfully and dramatically toward
stagnation or an Extinction Event.

Crossroads Model in Action
Timing and process targets may differ, but this five-step Crossroads Model is holding true across many
sectors. For example, upon Amazon’s IPO in 1997 – in spite of the lofty valuation that the consumer ecommerce pioneer achieved amid the Internet bubble and its resulting overinflation of value – Borders and
Barnes & Noble were collectively eight times the value of the online retail giant, with roughly 50 times
the revenue and 100 times the customer base.


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Quick Take
Code Halos: Early Days
We believe we are in the initial stages of the Code Halo phenomenon, marked by the
following characteristics:
●

●

●

●

●

Secular changes in business and technology are reshaping work: Our
personal technology experiences, with their heightened expectations of
efficiency and elegance, are genuinely reshaping enterprise work. Changing
demographics, economic volatility, new tools and a raised bar about how work
should be performed have all created a fertile context for business innovation.
Code Halos are the new basis of competition: Code Halos are critical to
gaining new business value in almost every industry. Business and technology
leaders need to follow early winners that have changed the rules of their
industry by delighting end customers, improving productivity and reducing
costs by focusing on Code Halos.
“Managing on meaning” is a key business competency: Companies
that proactively enrich their understanding of Code Halos with analytics and
sophisticated algorithms are creating the knowledge base for successful competition and market disruption across industries, companies and key business
processes.
Understanding the Crossroads Model is essential for winning in
information markets: Winning at the “Crossroads” – a compressed time
period in which market leadership flips dramatically – requires focusing on
Code Halos over hard assets. A five-stage model for success, which we detail
later in this paper, has emerged.
The SMAC Stack™ is the new technical foundation: New technologies
– social, mobile, business analytics and cloud solutions – are converging to
form a new IT architecture. The SMAC Stack is now embedded in the
enterprise, and it’s helping to rewire many key knowledge processes and
associated business models.

As Amazon quickly enriched its understanding of Code Halos, consumer e-commerce entered the
Crossroads in 2002. By 2005, Amazon was worth twice as much as Borders and Barnes & Noble combined,
and had equaled both retailers’ customer count (in similar markets such as book, movie and music
retailing) and associated revenues. Just five years later, Amazon was worth 100 times more than Borders
and Barnes & Noble combined, and had driven Borders to bankruptcy.1 Barnes & Noble’s struggles,
meanwhile, recently deepened amid the sudden resignation of its CEO (who championed its
underperforming Nook e-book reader) and word that the company is pursuing a radical restructuring.
In the mobile phone sector, similar dynamics have occurred. The dominant player of the late 1990s and
early 2000s – Nokia – has been replaced by organizations less focused on hardware features and more
attuned to the Code Rules of a digitizing marketplace. Beyond books and mobile devices, our research has
uncovered a similar pattern that has occurred consistently across more than a dozen industries to date.

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Determining Where Your Company Stands in the Crossroads Model
So, do you know your own company’s Code Halo and its place in the Crossroads Model? Do you know the
code of your best customers? And do you have a mechanism that allows these code bases to easily
connect and integrate? If this is an institutionalized capability at scale, you can
profoundly change your business for the better.
Where are the best places to start to understand how to apply Code Halo
thinking to your organization? Based on our industry-wide travels and
client work, we have concluded that savvy business leaders can take
practical steps to derive value in this new age of business and
technology:
●

Analyze your company at the process level. The road
is littered with failed initiatives attempting to reboot an
entire organization or business unit. You know better. Take a
hard look at your real business process anatomy (management,
new product and service development, sales and customer
relationship management, operations, etc.), and find the squeakiest wheels. Look for
processes that shape more than 20% of cost or revenue, and pick two. Work to apply Code
Halo thinking to those processes. Target tangible process metrics that are meaningful to
your industry – cost per claim, clinical trial yield, healthcare unit cost, fraud prevention
rates, etc. Find the Spark where code meets code, and work to recode moments of
engagement with clients, internal workers and partners.2

Look for processes that shape more than 20%
of cost or revenue, and pick two. Work to apply
Code Halo thinking to those processes.
●

●

See people, products and organizations as code. Many of the near-term targets
will be internal business processes, but many will be aligned with customer
interaction. “You had me at ‘hello’” is now more like, “You had me at
0100100001000101010011000100110001001111.’”3 Think of customers as essential
because of their data, not just because they are near-term sales prospects. It may seem
counterintuitive, but Code Halos can create more authentic experiences by building affinity
and communicating your company’s value.
Don’t hide under your “security blanket.” It would be naïve to think that issues of security,
privacy and the ethics of data management and exchange are simple to resolve. But it would
be similarly naïve to conclude that these issues are impossible to overcome or that Code Halo
sharing is not worth doing. The U.S. Department of Defense is crowdsourcing design and
implementing BYOD (bring your own device) strategies. Google Apps is FISMA accredited (an
information security management certification).4 There are bad people out there, but there
always have been. During the Renaissance, bandits on trade routes didn’t stop the explosion
of trade. In the Wild West, bank robbers didn’t slow a nation’s expansion. And more recently,
phishers have not slowed e-commerce. As with any form of commerce, there are risks
associated with Code Halos; in some places of the world, sharing your code is a good way to
get hurt, and there are many for whom the idea of offering up their Code Halo is unsettling and
paralyzing, bringing as it does both the specter of Anonymous (the infamous hacking group) and
“Big Brother.” But we see this shift as a song of hope. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
put it best: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” We are convinced that smart
deployment of Code Halo thinking – driving transparency and agility – will ultimately help your
organization and your customers.


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●

●

Don’t get SMACked! In many sectors and processes, SMAC Stack technologies are
already impacting the fundamental nature of business.5 Most cases cited in this article
simply would not work without this technology foundation. The SMAC Stack is enabling
new organizational models, economic value and the foundation of competitive advantage.
Very plainly, if you are not building key portions of your business on the principles and
realities of an emerging SMAC-powered model, then you are at risk of being usurped by
competitors that have.
Learn the new language of Code Halos. Making business meaning out of code is
already changing how companies – both those that are “born digital” and “digital
immigrants” – create value. S&P 500 outliers of the past five years have won based on
knowledge and meaning, not just assets and capital. Some decision-makers may categorize
this opportunity as “the CIO’s problem.” Others might focus on the more immediate
demands of the current quarter. Keep in mind that people – inside and outside your
company’s walls – want to engage with you and each other in dramatically different ways.
They have emerging expectations for how they want to interact, buy, sell, communicate and
collaborate. Business leaders should pick a few key spots and create a reasonable and
feasible plan to embrace this shift. The opportunity is vast, and the punishment for missing
this trend will be swift and harsh.

To learn more about the Crossroads Model and how Code Halos transform companies – and entire
industries – read our white paper “Code Rules: A Playbook for Managing at the Crossroads” available on
our Future of Work and Unevenlydistributed.com Web sites and begin crafting a strategy for winning the
new “code rush.”
In addition, a Code Halo book, e-book and app are coming soon. The app will be available this fall through
the Apple App Store. It will deliver a truly immersive experience via deep-dive videos, interactive graphics
and diagnostic tools.
Footnotes
1

In looking at the impact of Amazon, the firm has already forced a significant value shift in two
industries – books and technology – and is currently poised to do the same in several other sectors,
including technology services. Such has been the power of Amazon in transforming the customer
interface as well as the partner and supply chain.

2

Malcolm Frank and Geoffrey Moore, “The Future of Work: A New Approach to Productivity and
Competitive Advantage,” Cognizant Technology Solutions, December 2010,
http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/FutureofWork-A-New-Approach.pdf.

3

Apologies to Jerry McGuire writer/director Cameron Crowe and to Stanley Kubrick.

4

See http://www.govplace.com/2012/07/pentagon-may-deploy-byod-policy-by-2014/ and
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/government/benefits.html.

5

Malcolm Frank, "Don’t Get SMACked: How Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Technologies are
Reshaping the Enterprise," Cognizant Technology Solutions, November 2012,
http://www.cognizant.com/Futureofwork/Documents/dont-get-smacked.pdf.

Note: The logos and company names presented throughout this white paper are the property of their
respective trademark owners and are displayed for illustrative purposes only. Use of the logo does not
imply endorsement of the organization by Cognizant, nor vice versa.
Code Halo™ and Information Halo™ are pending trademarks of Cognizant Technology Solutions.

32 COGNIZANTi


Malcolm Frank is Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant. In this role, he focuses
on Cognizant’s brand, driving business through the company’s business units and overseeing Cognizant’s
corporate strategy, including its cloud initiative. Malcolm has authored articles in several leading industry
publications, is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on management and leadership, and
was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Finance in 2005 by Treasury & Risk magazine. He
earned a B.A. in Economics from Yale University.
Paul Roehrig, Ph.D., leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and drives strategy and market
outreach for the Business Process Services Practice. Prior to joining Cognizant, Paul was a Principal
Analyst at Forrester Research, where he researched and advised senior IT leadership on a broad range of
topics, including sourcing strategy, trends and best practices. Paul also held key positions in planning,
negotiation and successful global program implementation for customers from a variety of industries,
including financial services, technology, federal government and telecommunications for Hewlett-Packard
and Compaq Computer Corp. He holds a degree in journalism from the University of Florida and graduate
degrees from Syracuse University.
Ben Pring co-leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. He joined Cognizant after spending 15 years
with Gartner as a senior industry analyst researching and advising on areas such as cloud computing and
global sourcing. Prior to Gartner, Ben worked for a number of consulting companies including Coopers &
Lybrand. His expertise in helping clients see around corners, think the unthinkable and calculate the
compound annual growth rate of unintended consequences has brought him to Cognizant, where his
charter is to research and analyze how organizations can leverage the incredibly powerful new
opportunities that are being created as new technologies make computing power more pervasive, more
affordable and more important than ever before. Ben graduated with a degree in philosophy from
Manchester University in the UK.


COGNIZANTi

33

●

Essay

The Changing
Nature of Work:
New Hours, Venues,
Values, Norms
We are in the midst of inescapable change predicated on our hyperconnected,
always-on reality, in which work can be done anytime, anywhere. The key for
enterprises is to define which types of work require presence and which do
not, and master a tempo that shows no sign of slowing.
By Ben Pring

Earlier this year, newly installed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer set off a media firestorm when she canceled
Yahoo’s work-at-home policy. Coming from a Silicon Valley company assumed to be on the leading edge
of the changing workplace zeitgeist, Mayer’s move simultaneously surprised, confused, delighted and
angered the professional and citizen commentariat.
To us at Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, Mayer’s edict was especially provocative. In some
ways, her view was a direct shot across our bow; if the CEO of a big, important technology company was
in essence saying that the way we work – and the approaches to work that we recommend to our clients
– was suboptimal, then perhaps we should pause for a moment to reconsider whether the way we work
is still working.
Having taken that moment, we’ve decided the answer is “yes.” We’ve laid out here some of our points of
view on the future of work and why we strongly believe they are still the imminent future.

Reports of the Death of the Commute Are Not Greatly Exaggerated
Fundamentally, we remain convinced that over the next 10 to 20 years, the death of the commute will be
one of the most significant shifts (from a societal, corporate and personal perspective) that will occur. In
another generation’s time, historians will create apps about the odd period in man’s existence when
people sat in a car, train or bus for 30, 60 or even 120 minutes early in the morning, traveling to their place
of work. Then, early in the evening, they spent the same amount of time traveling back to their residence.
The next day, they did the same thing. And the day after that ... and the day after that ... five days a week
... 48 weeks a year ... for 40 years.


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35

The future historian will struggle to explain the madness that overcame late-20th-century man to a society
in which the vast majority of knowledge-based work – which will represent most of the work that gets
done – occurs in homes built (or retrofitted) with “offices” (really just a space where one works).
To truly understand the future of work, one needs to understand a little of the history of work. For most of
the world’s history, there has been little separation between where one lived and where one worked.
Soldiers, sailors, farmers and adventurers, as well as everyday people, worked in their homes or short
distances away in their villages or towns. The growth of industrialization forced individuals to travel
farther to their work, but through the 19th century, even large production or extraction facilities were
typically surrounded by housing, and “commutes” were counted in minutes, not hours.
The development and commercial exploitation of transportation was the main catalyst of change.
Entrepreneurs behind the expansion of the railways needed to encourage people to travel to profit on their
investments. Hence was born the idea of building housing away from places of work. The Metropolitan
Railway Country Estates Limited was established in 1919 in the UK to build housing in leafy northwest
London and beyond, into rural Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, to create passengers for
the Metropolitan Railway, which had been established in the 1860s but with limited success. The
commute was born and was copied throughout London, Paris (Metropolitan became the “Metro”) and
every other city in the world as populations exploded and societies configured themselves to make sense
of modern work and modern living.

To truly understand the future of work, one needs
to understand a little of the history of work.
The car-based commute emerged in the U.S. during the post-WWII era to supplement railroad
infrastructure as towns such as Levittown in Long Island, N.Y., offered housing in commutable distance to
New York City. The combination of affordable cars, low gas prices and undeveloped land produced a spurt
of development that gave rise to the The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’s middle-class aspirations, satisfied
by the daily trip to his Madison Avenue office.
Fast-forward to 2013, and the “success” of this commuting era is everywhere. Modern Western societies
are built on the movement of people to work. Train infrastructure, road infrastructure, air infrastructure,
the shape and look and feel of our cities, suburbs and towns all have at their core the transportation of a
person to his (her) job.
And yet, we can see the downsides of this phase of man’s history. The biggest, of course, is ecological.
Although arguments rage (and we have no intention of wading into socio-political waters here),
inconvenient truths are self-evident: Workers’ commutes are contributing (in a major way) to the warming
of the planet, with profound and unpredictable consequences. In less macro ways, the commute’s
downsides are more visible than ever. Now a victim of its own success, the commute’s infrastructure is
crumbling as tubes and rails built for tens of thousands handle tens of millions, and freeways built for
freedom pave over paradise and became (elongated) parking lots. The personal cost of these downsides
hardly needs articulating; nobody in their right mind would expound the virtues of their daily commute. It
is simply a necessary evil to be borne until better times prevail.
The future of work represents those better times. With the industrialization of the Internet, the need to
travel to work is diminishing. Work is now moving to where you are. The physical infrastructure of work
is being supplemented (and over time replaced) by the virtual infrastructure of work. The Internet highway
is being overlaid with more and more sophisticated and affordable functionality (e-mail, messaging, highdefinition videoconferencing, collaboration tools, etc.) that is making the online experience as good as
(and arguably at times better than) the in-person experience.

36 COGNIZANTi


Some work will, of course, remain geo-specific and, therefore, still require a commute. And to be fair to
Marissa Mayer, this may be exactly her point. Many physical tasks (mining, waitressing, policing, etc.) will
remain highly location-specific. Some location-specific work will simply be enhanced by virtual
capabilities (robotic mining, “surface-based” menu displays, “pre-crime” analytics downloaded to the
cop’s goggles). But the majority of knowledge work is already executable anywhere, and more and more
knowledge workers are already working where it makes sense for them to work, which increasingly does
not mean their company-provided cubicle.1 Extraordinary events such as major storms or rail crashes are
increasingly giving people occasion to try telecommuting, making what has already been “a good idea for
others but not for me” a familiar part of their new routine.

The Internet highway is being overlaid with
more and more sophisticated and affordable
functionality that is making the online
experience as good as (and arguably at times
better than) the in-person experience.
Knowledge workers will still travel for work; the face-to-face will retain its role and currency in business
development, as well as building and maintaining corporate esprit de corps. Many creative/knowledge jobs
will still require the heat generated by hand-to-hand combat, but the commute (i.e., the routine day-to-day trip
just to get to work) will, in time, be as antiquated as the telegraph, the typewriter and the fabled buggy whip.
The commute started out as the leading edge of modernity; business travel was the province of masters
of the universe. Now, smart execs use private plane services like NetJets when in-person presence is
absolutely necessary, but more often, they simply stay home and “Tandberg” or “Skype.” The commute is
now the lagging edge of modernity and is the physical embodiment of the drudgery of the salary man.

Many creative/knowledge jobs will still
require the heat generated by hand-to-hand
combat, but the commute will, in time, be as
antiquated as the telegraph, the typewriter
and the fabled buggy whip.
The movement of people to work will be seen in time as an aberration. While some might imagine that
the commuting model (and all the infrastructure that surrounds and supports it) is the natural pre-ordained
order of things, it is not. The commute was manufactured by those with a vested interest in its success
and was shaped by the dominant technologies of its time. The cultural norms that surround it (having to
be seen in the office to establish whether one is working or not is one notable example) will morph. Oncedominant technologies will be replaced by new ones of another era, such as the SMAC StackTM (social,
mobile, analytics and cloud), interactive surfaces, wearables and IP-addressable and always-connected
devices (the Internet of Things). As the advocates of these technologies will have different vested
interests, the commuting model will be replaced by a new approach, with different cultural norms that
make more sense to workers brought up on and accustomed to working in very different ways.


COGNIZANTi

37

With telecommuting, nontrivial costs such as HVAC, catering, beverages and network and physical
infrastructure can be passed back to employees, and corporations can shed underutilized office space.
Perhaps most important, a substantial body of evidence is emerging to support the notion that telecommuters
are more productive than in-office workers and have greater job satisfaction, which in turn helps with
recruitment and retention. Employees benefit from reduced commuting costs and more flexible schedules,
which helps with domestic responsibilities and family involvement and leads to higher job satisfaction. Lastly,
societies benefit from reduced carbon emissions, as one simple but fundamental example.

A moment’s self-reflection makes it clear that
the very idea of the “9-to-5” is diffusing, as
previously distinct working hours and
nonworking hours meld, merge and morph.
In 20 years time (and probably sooner), the renaissance of the “artisanal” pre-commuting model will be in
full force. Scale required people to be co-located in the past, but now and in the future, the management
of scale virtually will be a well-understood management discipline. Crowdsourcing, micro-tasking and
being a TaskRabbit2 offer a glimpse of a post-commuting world in which physical presence is sufficient
but not necessary.

Working 5-to-9, Trying to Make a Living
Just as technology changed the structure of where we work, technology is also fundamentally changing
the nature of when we work. A moment’s self-reflection makes it clear that the very idea of the “9-to-5”
is diffusing, as previously distinct working hours and nonworking hours meld, merge and morph. With the
advent of laptops, commonly available broadband Internet access and the rise of telecommuting, a
structured work day is now supplemented and overlaid with nonstructured working time.
At first, this reality manifested itself in the tendency to check e-mails or write
reports before and after the formal work day, at home and while commuting. As
this approach became more widespread, and as the requirement from
management for physical presence became less pressing, the norm of
working in set hours became less normalized. As mobile technology has
developed (i.e., miniaturization, functionality, form factor, hipness), a
hybridization of working and nonworking hours has become increasingly
common for knowledge workers in every corner of the planet.
Telecommuters now commonly mix working and nonworking hours
throughout the 24 hours of a day; they get up at 5:00 AM and do an hour of email, get the kids ready for school, get on a conference call at 8:00, walk the dog,
write a report from 9:30 until noon, go to the gym, watch The Colbert Report with a Lean
Cuisine lunch, write from 2:00 until 3:30, Skype with co-workers until 4:00, chat with the kids until 5:00,
do more e-mail until dinner at 6:00, help with homework until 7:00, write until 8:00, check e-mail until 9:00
and then collapse. Work-free Saturdays and Sundays – sacrosanct under the old model – today see blocks
of writing or e-mail catch-up time, too.
As this new approach becomes more widely accepted, its edges are being stretched even further. The 9to-5 workday is taking on quite different meanings for different types of work and styles of working; for
coders and creatives, technicians and technocrats alike, 9-to-5 may now mean, as in the above example,
5:00 AM to 9:00 PM, or for others, 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM.

38 COGNIZANTi


In a world of work distributed across locations and time zones – in which faces are only a screen away,
and where people are managed by the measurement of outputs and not just the input of time – the old 9to-5 is increasingly anachronistic. In its time, amid its shaping technologies, it was an entirely logical
(indeed admirable) convention that improved the lives of millions of people all around the world. In our
24/7, global, always-on environment, the 9-to-5 is becoming a relic of the past.
Although knowledge-based teleworkers are growing in numbers and impact, and their work practices are
becoming less the exception and more the rule, a good deal of insight and wisdom is lacking in making
the new 9-to-5 work for employee and employer alike. For many, the ability to work anytime-anywhere,
which at first was a tremendous blessing, is increasingly becoming a curse. Craving the endorphin rush of
receiving an e-mail, text or tweet, or anxiously beavering away at 3:00 AM on the 27th draft of the
morning’s presentation (amid tweeted news reports of the current unemployment rate), many a modern
cybernaut is manifesting addictive tendencies that can only end in tears.
Most “9-to-5ers” were able to put their work down when the whistle blew or they punched the clock, and
they were then free to concentrate on the nonworking part of their day (remember “hobbies” anyone?).
The modern “5-to-9er” has trouble turning off his mind, let alone his device. The nature of modern work
is such that the tools that promised us new freedoms have perhaps simply ended up giving us new
(designed in California) shackles.

We are in the midst of generational, secular
changes predicated on the inescapable reality
that the hyperconnected, always-on environment
in which most of the Western world now lives —
and which more and more of the developing
world is joining — is irreversible.
While it is perhaps tempting to imagine that new parent Marissa Mayer has work-life balance at the top
of her mind, it is unlikely that it was the motivation behind her “return to the office” manifesto. Figuring
out how to maximize the upsides (personally, corporately) of the new zeitgeist and minimize its downsides
is a task for every contemporary worker and manager. Doing this is nontrivial, and the temptation to simply
turn one’s back on the future and revert to old and trusted approaches is understandable. But that
approach misses the point that is at the heart of our future of work vision: We are in the midst of
generational, secular changes predicated on the inescapable reality that the hyper-connected, always-on
environment in which most of the Western world now lives – and which more and more of the developing
world is joining – is irreversible. The Internet is not about to be uninvented.

You Take the High Road, We’ll Take the Low Road,
And We’ll Be in the Future Before You
Of course, nothing in the real world is ever black or white; the complexity of gray surrounds us. Many
people – including, presumably, many Yahooites – will continue to work in their offices until their 401ks
mature. The infrastructure of the commute will not be fully overgrown by sylvan glades3 within our
lifetimes (although it may be in Detroit). The new Infostructure4 will not be complete for years to come.
Managing the grayness of the medium- to long-term transition that the future of work represents will be
a skill that some will master, and others won’t; in our view, personal and corporate fortunes will rise and


COGNIZANTi

39

fall based on its mastery. Generating clarity from within the grayness starts with understanding (at an
individual, team, unit and corporate level):
●
●
●
●

Which work requires presence and which work does not?
What are the precise elements of a job that need presence? Can these elements be
structured logically into presence and nonpresence blocks?
What is the employee’s attitude toward presence? Does he (she) welcome or resent it?
What are the employee’s personal circumstances that impact work undertaken with
presence/nonpresence?

●

How well does the employee work remotely?

●

What are the implications of a policy of presence on recruitment and retention?

Of course, each organization’s individual circumstances will ultimately determine how questions such as
these (and many more, including – most importantly – a cost/benefit analysis of presence/nonpresence)
are posed and addressed.
But it is undeniable that we are all now working in ways and moving at a pace that would surprise us if
we could roll back the clock even 10 years and that our parents – at their peak earning years – would have
found truly bewildering. The network infrastructure that supercharges commerce means the old “24-hour”
rule (i.e., returning e-mails and phone calls within 24 hours made famous by Larry Ellison and Tom Seibel
in the 1990s) is hopelessly outdated and has been replaced by a new “24-minute” one. The “industrial
mediatainment complex” feeds and nurtures our need for speed and urgency in 70-inch 3-D high
definition. And the volatile, plastic, morphing norms of the “social mediaverse” require sub-nano-second
participation that advertisers with a vested interest mock and celebrate simultaneously. Every aspect of
our working and nonworking lives is moving faster and faster, and we all need to react to, embrace and
master a tempo that shows no sign of slowing.

The network infrastructure that supercharges
commerce means the old “24-hour” rule is
hopelessly outdated and has been replaced
by a new “24-minute” one.
Ms. Mayer obviously had the interests of her specific company and her company’s specific circumstances
at the forefront when she made her recent decision; time – and the market – will be the judge if it was
the correct call.
But seen in the broader context of all the forces and dynamics and trends that we have outlined, the
commute and the 9-to-5 are vestiges of the past of work. So, if it’s all the same to you, Marissa, we will
continue to work on and in the future of work – remotely and at whatever time of day it makes sense.
Footnotes
1

According to a 2012 Reuters/IPSOS survey, 20% of Americans are regularly telecommuting (the term
invented by University of Southern California’s Center for Futures Research professor Jack Nilles in
1972), and a wide array of reports from distinguished academics and analysts suggest these numbers
are only moving in one direction. According to Carnegie Mellon University, 40% of current work could
already be done from home.

40 COGNIZANTi


2

TaskRabbit is an online marketplace where people can post jobs that they need to get done and the
price they are willing to pay. A network of “TaskRabbits” can bid to complete the job. For more
information: https://www.taskrabbit.com/business.

3

A sylvan glade refers to the ancient forests in Europe. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sylvan.

4

Walter Russell Mead, “Infostructure is the New Infrastructure,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 15,
2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578000690515270954.html.

Ben Pring co-leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. He joined Cognizant after spending 15 years
with Gartner as a senior industry analyst researching and advising in areas such as cloud computing and
global sourcing. Prior to Gartner, Ben worked for a number of consulting companies, including Coopers &
Lybrand. His expertise in helping clients see around corners, think the unthinkable and calculate the
compound annual growth rate of unintended consequences has brought him to Cognizant, where his
charter is to research and analyze how organizations can leverage the incredibly powerful new
opportunities that are being created as new technologies make computing power more pervasive, more
affordable and more important than ever before. Ben graduated with a degree in philosophy from
Manchester University in the UK. He can be reached at Benjamin.Pring@cognizant.com.


COGNIZANTi

41

●

The Last Word

Keep on SMACking:
Taking Social, Mobile,
Analytics and Cloud to
the Bottom Line
Winning organizations have programs in place to identify, understand,
prioritize and overcome emerging SMAC challenges and have
established ‘Big Rules’ for business and IT leaders to work through
governance and technological roadblocks.
By Bruce J. Rogow

With all the hype and confusion about emerging information technologies, particularly social, mobile,
analytics and cloud (what we call the SMAC StackTM), it is very easy to lose sight of the big picture and
its implications.
SMAC and a growing array of IT alternative delivery vehicles – such as software as a service (SaaS) and
business process as a service (BPaaS) – are the major tradewinds swirling into the enterprise at the same
time that industry structures and business architectures are changing. SMAC must be considered not as
a set of “cute things we can do” but as an enabler for a wider context of profound business and
technology transformation.
As industries change and new IT products and services emerge, businesses must adapt their IT
architectures and capabilities to take advantage of what can be sourced internally and through third
parties. These adaptations typically take 15 or more years, but leaders at winning organizations recognize
the stakes, scope and challenges early on. They blend new, changing and existing parts to ensure material
business contribution and increased competitiveness over the short-, mid- and long-term. In today’s SMAC
context, winners see and execute against the strategic shift amid business change.
Winners don’t wait for change to sort itself out or assume that they will succeed by continuing to do what
they have been doing, only more diligently. They try to take advantage of the short-term opportunities
afforded or demanded by the changing landscape and begin to work toward a scalable and iterative IT
vision as they connect the dots and lay a proper foundation.


COGNIZANTi

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Cognizanti Journal: XaaS, Code Halos, SMAC and the Future of Work

Cognizanti Journal: XaaS, Code Halos, SMAC and the Future of Work

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